PEOPLE in the Polish capital held a day of commemorations yesterday, the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

Officials stood at attention and people stopped in the street as sirens wailed and church bells tolled at noon in a sign of mourning for the Jews who died fighting, as well as the millions of other Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

President Andrzej Duda spoke during official commemorations at the monument to the Warsaw ghetto heroes and pay homage to the hundreds of Jewish fighters who took up arms in the 1943 rebellion against German occupying forces during the Second World War.

The revolt ended in death for most of the fighters, yet left behind an enduring symbol of resistance.

At a ceremony at Warsaw’s Town Hall, three Holocaust survivors, Helena Birenbaum, Krystyna Budnicka and Marian Turski, were given honorary citizenship of the city.

Hundreds attended an “independent” gathering by Poles furious at a government that sometimes seems to tolerate or even support anti-Semitic views.

Open Republic, an association that fights anti-Semitism and xenophobia, said it was organising its ceremony in opposition to what it called the “hollow nationalist pomp” of the government, recalling how the prime minister earlier this year paid tribute to a Polish wartime insurgency unit that had collaborated with the Nazis.